"H is for Hawk" by Helen MacDonald (published 2014) - my 2nd review.

Read my first review of H is for Hawk at this link: https://feliciareviewsbooks.blogspot.com/2019/09/h-is-for-hawk-by-helen-macdonald.html

When I read H is for Hawk for the first time, I was mesmerized by the tale of a human coming into contact with something wild and violent, the hawk. I knew that she, writer Helen MacDonald, was different than others who've told this story in that her story was not about the capturing of a hawk for scientific purposes, but rather a story about the experience of making of a bridge between two worlds that coincide in reality: the first, that of civilization, the second, that of the wilderness. At first reading, I was fascinated by her hawk Mabel and the relationship she shared with her owner, a relationship that can only be called such because of immense amounts of patience, expertise and knowledge, compromise, and dedication. To take care of and gain the trust of any wild animal is difficult, but a hawk especially. This mesmerizing effect and fascination did not wane during my second reading but it grew and grew. I realized that if I had not read it this second time, I would have missed something integral to this tale: that the bridge between these two worlds, although there, needn't constantly be crossed in order to possess the staying magic of the natural world which we inhabit constantly. The key: that the bridge must be crossed, but it needn't stay stuck in a pathway both vicious and detrimental to both sides, that the crossing is an acknowledgment of both reaching towards the other, but that the two need not mean the same thing, that the two, indeed, need not merge into one; the importance of this is simply thus so the two, wilderness and civilization, can coexist with one another... even in the same house, as this beautiful nonfiction exemplifies for our learning.

Though MacDonald was keen on animals, particularly reptilian creatures, throughout her whole life, with birds taking her most prominent interest as she grew up, there was a specific event that put H is for Hawk into motion. It was death. In her adulthood, MacDonald's father unexpectedly dies, leaving her unable to comprehend her place in the world. Her mother and brother and close friends grieved as well, but, for whatever reason, she felt this loss at a level of isolation. She turns to one of her first loves, falconry, as a way to cope with this profound loss.

"Here's a word. Bereavement. Or, Bereaved. Bereft. It's from the Old English bereafian, meaning 'to deprive of, take away, seize, rob'. Robbed. Seized. It happens to everyone. But you feel it alone. Shocking loss isn't to be shared, no matter how hard you try." (13)

Is it hard to understand why MacDonald began to deal with the shocking death of her father by taking in an animal that was capable of stripping away another life in an instant? Is it difficult to come to terms with why she would find that kind of mirror by which to gauge, or otherwise, erase, her pain? It isn't, really. In moments of unrelenting despair, I feel that most of us find something to latch onto as we fall down the rabbit hole like Alice. For MacDonald, it was a goshawk. It had to be. She says, "What we see in the lives of animals are lessons we've learned from the world." (60) What is so touching about H is for Hawk is not so much in MacDonald finding the perfect other by which to compose her identity, but in finding a common ground by which to run away and hide from her identity in the moment that disrupts what she knows as reality. Far from pursuing objective inquiry into a predatory bird, MacDonald takes a jump so as to reach further into that netherworld of wilderness to find out what life, and death, might come to grips with. No one of us has to experience a loss as severe as MacDonald's to be sensitive to her story: this book, so full of lyricism that never veers into a romanticization of the natural world as is typical, is so important for our society today because it urges us to walk over to the other side with a little less fear, a little more truthfully, and much more respectfully, holding awe protected within us.

Strangely, H is for Hawk is labelled under the category of Agriculture in the Library of Congress classification system. Books that can be found on the same shelf as MacDonald's are books on hunting, the hunting of "game" (like buffalo), waterfowl, and other animals typically killed for their meat, or animals which are predators, killing prey for their meat. While it makes sense that H is for Hawk is placed here, it also makes the book very hard to find, for the book itself is actually a complex mix of memoir, self-help, literary criticism, cultural criticism, hunting, animals, and philosophy which comes into that fine thread of meditation on humanity's place within the natural world, a human's place in what we know as the "wild". The arch of MacDonald's book is profound: while she takes the hawk in to train, she runs away from her entire life, becomes a kind of hermit, just her and Mabel. She cuts herself up in brambles, dedicates everything to this oddly vicious, kindly creature, and forgets who or what she is... she forgets what it is to be human. But that was the point.

"I thought of sad birds in soundproofed cages, and how your earliest experiences teach you who you are. I thought of the house from my dream. I thought of home. And then, with a slow, luxuriant thrill, I realized that everything was different about the house I was in. It was the hawk. I shut my eyes. The hawk had filled the house with wildness as a bowl of lilies fills a house with scent. It was about to begin... In the half-light through the drawn curtains she sits on her perch, relaxed, hooded, extraordinary. Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleep, cafe-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-colored teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai. 'Hello hawk,' I whisper, and at the sound she draws her feathers tight in alarm. 'Hush,' I tell myself, and the hawk." (65)

"Of all the lessons I've learned in my months with Mabel this is the greatest of all: that there is a world of things out there - rocks and trees and stones and grass and all the things that crawl and run and fly. They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our own views of the world. In my time with Mabel I've learned how you feel more human once you have known, even in your imagination, what it is like to be not. And I have learned, too, the danger that comes in mistaking the wildness we give a thing for the wildness that animates. Goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities. Their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all." (275)

So MacDonald comes full circle. Her diary-like chapters ("Holding tight", "Invisibility", "The rite of passage", "Darkness", to name a few) give an almost harrowing account of her descent into wildness, of losing touch with civilization, and then coming back around to appreciating what she is in truth. She is human, after all, and why shouldn't we feel relieved too when we find that Mabel is a bird, a goshawk, after all.

Running parallel to MacDonald's personal memoir about her life as a young girl, her fascination with reptilian creatures, her relationship with her dad (a well-loved British photographer), and her training of Mabel, is a sharp-minded literary "critique" of T.H. White's book The Goshawk. White himself had his own story about his own goshawk, a goshawk that eventually flies far away from him, a goshawk named Gos. That tragic tale, not without catharsis, was a tale of abuse, of abusing that which one wanted to have power over, an abusing that came from a history of abuse. White was abused as child, primarily by his parents, and the vicious cycle continued as White attempted to care for the wild goshawk as a way of "taming" himself and to find a kind of love. MacDonald shares her accounts of reading how Gos was spoiled by food, neglected by starvation, confused by a man's impatient treachery. It was a failure, yet there is a fruitful lesson, once which MacDonald ended up learning through her own experience with Mabel, a lesson which ties both the hawks to the humans in an elegant moment of clarity which, believably, only seems to be reached by an experience or a collapsing idea of subject and object, their merging, and their final separation. MacDonald's revelations towards the end are as follows:

"Hands are for other human hands to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks. And the wild is not a panacea for the human soul; too much in the air can corrode it to nothing." (218)

"Turning into an animal can imperil the human soul... I'd turned myself into a hawk - taken all the traits of goshawks in the books and made them my own. I was nervous, highly strung, paranoid, prone to fits of terror and rage; I ate greedily or didn't eat at all; I fled from society, hid from everything; found myself drifting into strange states where I wasn't certain who or what I was. In hunting with Mabel, day after day, I had assumed - in my imagination, of course, but that was all it could ever be - her alien perspective, her inhuman understanding of the world. It brought something akin to madness, and I did not understand what I had done. When I was small I thought turning into a hawk would be a magical thing... but now the lesson was killing me. It was not at all the same." (211 - 212)

In certain passages she reflects on the utter stupidity of using animals as symbols or mascots (for example, the falcon was reduced to a Nazi image, and instances where people have mimicked the outer appearance of animals as ways to connect with them; the final blow in the of killing them for resources). The reduction of an animal, any animal, to a stereotype as just as bad as any other generalization or prejudice. Worse when animals become humanity's symbol for reckless and needless violence. Some of my favorite passages, though, are where MacDonald maps another kind of bridge, between herself and the history of England, and specifically the historical link to falconry as a sport of the aristocracy. There is a certain pride she feels in her connection to the land and her British lineage, though the pride is not without its guilt.

"...at heart it had grown out of the trauma of the Great War, and was flourishing in fear of the next. The critic Jed Etsy has described this pastoral craze as one element in a wider movement of national cultural salvage in these years; it was a response to economic disaster, a contracting Empire and totalitarian threats from abroad. It was a movement that celebrated ancient sites and folk traditions... it believed that something essential about the nation has been lost and could be returned, if only in the imagination..." (104)

"And falconry for me was about revealing in the flight of the hawk, never in the death it brought. But when my hawk caught things I was pleased - partly for the hawk, and partly because I had, as a child, bought into that imagined world of tweed-clad Victorian falconers, where death was visceral and ever-present and hedged with ceremonial formalities. When I watched those men with goshawks put the dead pheasant in the bag all those years ago I saw a kind of ease that bespoke centuries of social privilege and sporting confidence... but I had forgotton that the puzzle that was death was caught up in the hawk, and I was caught up in it too." (60)

"Chalk landscapes do this to me; bring an exhilarating, on-tiptoe sense that some deep revelation is at hand. This makes me feel guilty. There is a long vein of chalk-mysticism buried in English nature-culture, and I know that what I'm feeling, standing here, partakes of it. I'm guilty because I know that loving landscapes like this involves a kind of history that concerns itself with purity, a sense of deep time and blood-belonging, and assumes that these solitudinous windswept landscapes are finer, better, than the landscapes below." (260)

MacDonalds struggles with this, her pride in falconry (her expertise and knowledge within the field is something to witness, to learn from, to revel in) and her pride in the land, both of which seem to be part of her very bones. But as she struggles with her deep emotions, quite possibly inherent and ingrained, she offers something up for everyone, for all of us, for each human living on this earth:

"...you can reconcile the wild. You can bring it home with you." (252)

Take this with a grain of salt, if only to remember that reconciliation does not mean a loss of things in themselves. The wild is a part of us, but it is not who we are, and vice versa. But there are moments we can share, and MacDonald stretches these moments out in all their glory and all their comradely and communion; for that I urge you to read this book because this world badly needs to make bridges stepping towards that wild in us that we fear or worse, neglect. One moment of shared existence between MacDonald and Mabel is perfect to end with:

"...I'd look down on the world below, basking in the fierce calm that comes from being invisible but seeing everything. Watching, not doing. Seeking safety in not being seen. It's a habit you can fall into, willing yourself into invisibility. And it doesn't serve you well in life. Believe me it doesn't. Not with people and loves and hearts and homes and work. But for the first few days with a new hawk, making yourself disappear is the greatest skill in all the world." (68)